Suchergebnisse

War, from the conflicts in the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine to Mexican narco-violence, from neocolonial land grabs in the Global South to racial, border, health, and climate crises all over the planet, defines the most extreme and contradictory expression of the global world. In this fascinating exploration on the history of the thinking of conflict, Edgar Illas departs from military and sociological analyses to propose a theoretical exploration of war as the ontological force that produces political orders. Magma is used as a geological metaphor to theorize the mixtures of politics and war that organize, and disorganize, global society. Divided into two parts, Illas' study begins by surveying some of the most important thinkers of war, moving from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. Each thinker provides a different inflection in the historical evolution of the being of war. The second part turns to a theorization of the twenty-first century to claim that conflictive relations between capital, state power, political movements, and social life in globalization culminate and at the same time reiterate the paradoxes of war as an ontological event. The Magma of War is an energizing contribution to the task of rethinking politics in relation to war and an invaluable resource to all those conscious of the unstable forms of contemporary social and political life.

The Survival Regime explores the concept of survival to describe the effects on politics of the fusion of war and capital in globalization. Survival defines a sort of degree zero governmentality that has resulted from the crumbling of the political and spatial architecture of modernity, particularly the state. It does not simply name the new content of all politics or the economic law of the strongest of neoliberalism. Rather, it theorizes how systemic violence and permanent instability force political life to struggle for its own existence, thus generating a regime based on productive engagement and urgent intervention. Through a critical dialogue with various contemporary thinkers (Galli, Hardt and Negri, Esposito, Agamben, Derrida, and Schmitt, among others), Edgar Illas theorizes survival as a global logic that overcomes the links between life and power explained by the Foucauldian paradigm of biopolitics. He examines parallel notions such as singularity, aleatoriness, eclecticism, and distinction to question previous theorizations of the political based on class struggle, inclusion, hegemony, or recognition of demands. Through the intersection of different lines of inquiry, including Marxism, war theory, biopolitics, and deconstruction, The Survival Regime contributes to the rethinking of critical theory, political theory, and cultural studies in globalization.

Thinking Barcelona studies the ideological work that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s and adapted the city to a new economy of tourism, culture, and services. It does so by examining political speeches and scripts of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games ceremonies, with special focus on Xavier Rubert de Ventós's screenplay for the reception of the flame in Empúries; the urban renewal of Barcelona directed by architect Oriol Bohigas; and fictional narratives by Quim Monzó, Francisco Casavella, Eduardo Mendoza, and Sergi Pàmies

Abstract
This article reflects on the possibility of resisting globalization by relying on some sense of the local as found in public art and public space. The term 'urban tellurics' explores how the notion of the tellurics of place, which I derive from Heidegger's thinking and from Kenneth Frampton's proposal for a Critical Regionalist architecture of resistance, interacts with the reality of endless urbanization within global capitalism. To articulate this relation, I focus on a singular public space in Barcelona, the Parc de la Creueta del Coll, designed in 1987 by the architectural firm MBM. The park was 'sculpted' on the slopes of a former stone quarry and includes a sculpture by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida that hangs above a swimming pool. Heidegger considered Chillida's work the most precise embodiment of his thought on art and space. Thus, focusing on the tension between the telluric elements of the park and the flat surface of the swimming pool provides a good occasion to reflect on the contradictions between Heideggerian rootedness and the flatness of capitalist globalization. 'Urban tellurics' aims to enable forms of spatial resistance that are neither reactionary returns to the provinces, nor mere celebrations of city diversity, nor simple manifestations of political struggle.

L'elegia IX de les Elegies de Bierville de Carles Riba, escrita a la França ocupada el 1941, conté una contradicció aparent sobre el rol de la guerra en la construcció de la democràcia. D'una banda, Riba escriu que, a l'hora de fundar la democràcia, a Grècia no li calia guanyar la guerra amb Pèrsia, sinó només donar cabuda al desig de llibertat d'uns homes atenencs. D'altra banda, però, el poema acaba suggerint que la guerra també forma part de la democràcia, ja que aquells que no són lliures, "els batuts", es retroben a si mateixos com a soldats que lluiten per aconseguir la llibertat.El meu treball fa una lectura històrica de l'elegia política de Riba i relaciona la contradicció que conté amb el sorgiment de l'independentisme a la Catalunya contemporània. La meva pregunta és si cal entendre l'independentisme com un desig de democràcia o com una guerra per obtenir poder estatal. Per formular la pregunta, contraposo el terme de Michael Hardt i Antonio Negri "poder constituent" sobre els moviments actuals de transformació política i el terme de Carlo Galli "guerra global" sobre les guerres de poder sobre l'espai en la globalització. La meva hipòtesi és que a la Catalunya global, com en el poema de Riba, democràcia i guerra continuen generant una contradicció insoluble i necessària.The elegy IX of Carles Riba's Elegies de Bierville, written in occupied France in 1941, contains an apparent contradiction about the role of war in the construction of democracy. On the one hand, Riba writes that, in order to found of democracy, Greece did not have to win the war against Persia; all they needed was to recognize and accommodate the longing for freedom of a particular group of Athenians. On the other hand, however, the poem suggests in the end that war is also part of democracy, as those who are not free, the "vanquished," can only regain their souls by acting as soldiers who fight for freedom. My paper undertakes a historical reading of Riba's political elegy and relates its contradiction to the emergence of separatism in contemporary Catalonia. My question is whether we must understand separatism as a longing for democracy or as a war to obtain state power. To formulate this question, I juxtapose Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's notion of "constituent power," which theorizes today's movements of political transformation, to Carlo Galli's term "global war," which describes the power wars in the spaces of globalization. My hypothesis is that in global Catalonia, like in Riba's poem, democracy and war continue to generate an inherent and unsurpassable contradiction.